The Quiet Battle Every Chief Marketing Officer Fights

"The hardest part of being a #CMO isn't the marketing. It's marketing marketing. The skill no one talks about, but every long-tenured CMO masters. The CFO doesn't have to pitch the importance of finance. The COO isn't explaining why operations matter. The CTO doesn't have to sell the value of technology. But the CMO? We sell marketing. Every. Single. Day. Not to customers, but to our own organization. Proving value. Defending budgets. Explaining (yet again!) why brand matters just as much as the bottom line."

"It was such an honest articulation of a shared truth that it sparked this piece. This perspective reflects patterns I've seen across my career and in ongoing conversations with fellow chief marketing officers, and not any one individual employer. And while the post went on to describe why marketing is uniquely misunderstood-because everyone has ideas, but few understand the depth of the discipline-it captured something deeper: the emotional labor behind leading marketing inside a company."

"The Reality: You're Always Selling Marketing Internally Across industries and company sizes, CMOs share the same experience: You can deliver brand lifts, pipeline acceleration, improved win rates and better customer engagement, and still find yourself re-explaining why marketing matters. Because marketing is both everywhere and nowhere. Everyone participates in it, but few understand the machinery behind it. Before CMOs can shape the market, they must convince their own organizations that marketing is not a cost center, but a strategic engine of growth."

Chief marketing officers must continuously sell the strategic value of marketing inside their organizations to secure buy-in, defend budgets, and ensure marketing gains parity with other functions. Marketing’s impact often emerges over time, has shared outcomes, and is commonly misunderstood because many contribute ideas without understanding the discipline’s depth. Successful CMOs translate brand and long-term value into measurable outcomes, demonstrate pipeline and engagement improvements, and communicate why brand matters alongside short-term revenue. The role requires emotional labor, storytelling, measurement rigor, and persistent advocacy to shift perceptions and position marketing as a growth engine rather than a cost center.

Read at Forbes